Making a Europe fit for the cloud

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: Danny Palmer.

While Europe teeters on the brink of financial armageddon, the European Commission (EC) claims that a coherent cloud strategy for the bloc could generate £127bn per year and create 3.8 million jobs.

In its Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe report, the EC suggests that implementing a coherent cloud strategy across the region could cut the operational costs of IT departments for all types of organisations, along with boosting productivity and growth. According to the report, three key areas need to be addressed in order to enable a workable cloud strategy across Europe…

The first is “cutting through the jungle of technical standards”. Technology providers currently fight for market share by locking their customers into their service, preventing the adoption of standardised, cross-industry approaches to the cloud. This prevents interoperability, data portability and reversibility (the ability of customers to take data and functions back in-house again), making cross-European cloud implementation difficult. The EC wants to identify methods to implement standardisation of cloud services across Europe by next year, the first step in a process that envisages lasting until 2020.

The report also identifies contractual issues. Cloud contracts are often complex and uncertain, leading to worries over data access and portability. It also suggests that while “take-it-or-leave-it” contracts might be advantageous for cloud providers, they’re often undesirable for users of the service, with many failing to identify liability in the case of failures due to downtime, for example, or to make clear how service issues will be compensated and resolved…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/feature/2216820/making-a-europe-fit-for-the-cloud